Alan Heston is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He did his BA, MA and Ph.D. from the Universities of Oregon, Washington and Yale. He joined Penn in 1962 and retired in 2003, with time in the United Nations, India and Pakistan. Along with Irving Kravis and Robert Summers, he founded the International Comparison Program (ICP) in 1968. In 1998, he was designated along with Robert Summers as Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association for their development of the Penn World Table (PWT) that used the ICP benchmark studies as a basis for their extensions in time and space. An improved PWT is now housed at the University of Groningen. He has continued his association with the ICP since 2003 when the implementation moved to the World Bank. He is a long-standing member of the ICP Technical Advisory Group, and served as its Chair from 2004-2007.
